Animosity
by Kanthia
Summary: Kousuke's your regular, average fifteen-year-old kid in a messed-up Shibuya. He likes listening to music, sleeps in on Sunday, and the wind is whispering nonsense to him. And as his world comes apart, he's drawn to one name.
1. Ears Hear All

**Animosity**  
**Rating:** PG-13 for some swearing  
**Warning:** Spoilers for the end of the game and the secret reports.  
**Summary:** Kousuke's your regular, average fifteen-year-old kid in a messed-up Shibuya. He likes listening to music, sleeps in on Sunday, and the wind is whispering nonsense to him.

**Lesson One: Ears Hear All**

Kousuke was fifteen when he first heard the wind. Well, he'd heard _wind_ before, but on the day he turned fifteen his parents bought him an MP3 player and that's when he started hearing the wind talk to him.

He was walking back from school to his apartment, savouring the feeling of popularity that came with such a cool piece of technology. It was just starting to get a little dark when all of the sudden the wind picked up out of nowhere and rattled underneath his headphones.

_Sa_, it said. _Saaaaaa._

'_Sa'?_ _As in 'help'?_ "Someone need help?"

_Sa_, it said, and it sounded like someone was crying.

He looked until the sun went down but couldn't find anyone. The sound followed him all the way home.

x x x

"Sa," he said. "That's all I hear, 'sa'. It's louder when I have headphones on- like it's trying to compete with the music."

"Interesting. What did you get for number seven?"

"The null space of the inverse matrix has a dimension of 4. Maybe I'm just imagining the whole thing."

"Maybe, maybe not. I got a dimension of 3, not 4. Are you sure you didn't miss a free variable?"

"Positive. Listen, Ri- I know it sounds weird, but someone's calling for help and I don't know who."

Risuna put down her pencil and looked at him square in the eye from across the table. "I'm not saying you're lying, Kousuke. When I'm outside at night, I hear a really soft voice saying 'me'. If they're saying 'help' to you and 'me' to me…maybe someone's asking us for help."

"'Help me'? That's half English, though. I just- I don't know."

"Maybe this whole thing is a giant prank. You make the matrix equal the zero column vector, not the zero row vector. That's why you got a messed-up answer."

"Thanks." He leaned back in his chair, tapping his pencil on the desk like a drumstick. Outside, the wind picked up. "Or maybe we're just going crazy."

x x x

He found the second hypothesis to pick up significant steam in the weeks to come. Risuna assured him that for her it was a whisper, a strained sound that she only heard if she concentrated hard enough. For him it was soon loud enough that he could hear it even when he was indoors, a constant wailing that pressed on his ears and kept him up at night.

The regular human can take sleepless nights only for so long. Eventually, in his delirium at another waking 3:00 AM he talked to it.

_Sa_, it said.

"Sa who?"

_Sa_, it replied, slightly more indignant. Tears of frustration crept up in his eyes. He threw off his covers, padded over to his window and threw it open.

"_WHO_?" His voice echoed through the empty streets; he was tired, frightened and alone. The streetlights pulsed with sudden intensity. "Who the fuck-" he broke down in sobs, tears running down his face. "-Who the fuck keeps calling me?"

There was a long period of silence, as though the voice was stunned by his sudden burst of emotion. Then it returned.

_Koo,_ it said, finally. _Saaaa kooooooo_.

x x x

"_How is he?"_

"_Still the same, I'm afraid. Brooding as usual."_

"_And Shibuya?"_

"_Hanging in there, but not for much longer."_

"…_Shit."_

"_But the kid's out there, we know that for sure. He answered last night."_

"_Do you know where he is?"_

"_No, the Imagination's not fully realized yet. Too weak to trace."_

"_We need to find him, don't we? To save Shibuya."_

"…_Yeah. Cats have nine lives, so I suppose this one can live again."_

"_I don't know what we'd do without you, Sanae."_

x x x

_Sa ku_, he wrote, inside the covers of his books. _Sa ku_ in the margins of his assignments. _Sa ku_ elegantly scrawled, like graffiti, on walls and crevices and hiding places. It came as easily as writing his own name.

"Sa ku," he mumbled. "Help place? Helping place? Helping sentence?" He rubbed his eyes. The voice had started to, rather politely, step down after sunset and allow him to sleep. It seemed more strained now- like it was starting to die.

"Helping place what?" His English teacher was suddenly standing over his desk, looking down indignantly. "Kousuke, if you don't find my classroom a good 'helping place', might I suggest a detention as the next best option?"

"Sorry," he mumbled, and signed the detention slip _Kousuke Sa ku_.

x x x

"I'm thinking of running away from home," Risuna announced as they walked nowhere in particular, bookbags heavy on their backs.

_Sa ku_, said the wind.

"Why?" Kousuke kicked an unlucky can that happened to be near his foot. It clattered down the concrete steps in Udagawa. "What's wrong?"

"I want to be a fashion designer, but my parents think it's stupid. They want me to go to college and become a doctor."

He couldn't give her a satisfactory answer. She knew what she wanted to hear, and she knew what was right; though the two weren't mutually exclusive, they might as well have been for a fifteen-year-old. _Sa ku_. "Hey, it's getting louder. D'you hear it?"

She cupped her ears with her hands, skirt bustling in the rising wind. "Yeah, a little. How loud is this wind to you?"

"I- holy _crap_," he said, stopping dead in his tracks.

The graffiti in front of them was all new. Yesterday and the day before and the day before and the day before it had all been mute and smudged, an elegy for a long-lost mural. Someone had come the night before and painted it over- the scent of fresh paint and _something else_ hung in the air, but it looked dry.

In more colours than he could count, the painting looped and twisted and turned over and through itself; a symphony of colour and shape and dissonance. He was at once mesmerized and repulsed. His entire body was shaking. The wind was howling in his ears, compelling him to reach out and touch.

As soon as his fingertips brushed against the cool surface the entire world went white- and then in the space between breaths he witnessed the murder and the waking and the first week and the second week and the third week and fights and the deaths and the rebirths and the final, merciless, peaceful end of it all. He was barely aware that he was screaming, then gurgling, then vomiting and collapsing where the boy with the orange hair had once died, leaving a stunned Risuna to run for help while he counted the angel feathers that fell around him.

_Saaaa koooo raaaa baaaa_


	2. Mind Soon Remembers

**Animosity**

**Lesson Two: Mind Soon Remembers**

He woke up in a bed to the steady sound of beeping. Everything was fuzzy at first, and then faded into view- the white tiled ceiling, the curtains and machinery. He was in Shibuya General Hospital.

"What the-" he tried to sit up but had to fall back, a terrible pain nestled nicely between his eyes. A doctor rushed over to him. Once he had been forcefully settled back into a comfortable position, the doctor made a note on his clipboard and looked up.

"Can you tell me where you are?"

"Shibuya General Hospital," Kousuke said, confused.

"Where do you go to school?"

He told him that, and his date of birth, and his favourite colour, and that he preferred pizza over spaghetti before he stopped and asked why he was being asked these questions.

"You had a seizure," the doctor said, making checkmarks on his clipboard and giving him a small smile. "In Udagawa. Your friend Risuna phoned for the ambulance. I'm just making sure that nothing up there was damaged. Can you tell me your full name?"

"Kousuke Sakuraba," he said, then froze. "No- wait." It had come out so naturally, as though it was his real name. "Sorry- when I- in Udagawa-"

_Sakuraba_, the wind said. _Saaa koooo raaaa baaaa_.

"Get out of my _HEAD!_" Vaguely, he was aware of the machine he was wired to beeping frantically and an alarm going off, hundreds of hands raining down to hold his body as he struggled and convulsed, fighting against the silver-haired boy who had invaded his mind.

x x x

"_Composer, Sir. You must stop- you're going to drive that boy mad."_

"_He won't go mad."_

"_Composer, Sir. You're going to kill him."_

"_Let me take over from here. Josh, stop it. Let him come to you."_

"_P-Producer, Sir!"_

"_He's not coming unless I get him."_

"_And if you keep trying to 'get him', you'll have another corpse to deal with."_

"…_You always were so cruel, Sanae."_

x x x

The called it stress and discharged him three days later after a complete and embarrassingly in-depth psychological test. He didn't mention the wind, of course. He told them that a spider had crawled in his ear as a kid and he'd been terrified of things touching his ears ever since- it seemed to pacify them, so they labelled him sane.

And maybe this diagnosis was correct, because the wind had stopped. It was too late, of course; Kousuke left the hospital with a mission. It carried him all the way to the head office of the Shibuya Daily Newspaper.

"May I help you?" The lady behind the desk looked bored, the sound of her chewing gum the loudest thing in the room once her voice was gone.

"I'd like to look through your archives," he said, so convincingly that he almost convinced himself. "I'm doing a project on a relative of mine and I thought of bringing in a copy of his obituary report."

She might have said no, but he was tall and young and lanky and dark-haired. "Uh," she replied instead. "Sure. Follow me, please."

She took him to a large room filled floor-to-ceiling with pull-out drawers and a table with four computers in its center. "Every Shibuya Daily printed in the last fifty years is in here," she said, her speech proud but rehearsed. "Look up whatever his name is on the computer and it'll tell you where to search. The ladders can slide around, but don't go doing anything that'll get you killed. If you need any help, come and find me."

"Thanks," he said, and waited until she left to sit down.

_Right._ He was partly excited and mostly nervous as he navigated to the Obituaries section and pressed the four keys. _Sa Ku Ra Ba_. It was a nice name- not one he'd ever heard before, but it slid off the tongue well. And sure 'sa' could mean 'help' and 'ku' could mean 'place' or ten hundred other things, but the whole name…it rolled quietly, like the sound of sakura petals hitting the ground in early spring. Reflexively, he closed his eyes after hitting the button to search, not sure if he was ready to see.

He took a deep breath and unsuccessfully tried to slow his wild heart when he opened his eyes, not prepared for the first result to be the name that had eluded his lips for so long.

_Sakuraba Neku_.

"Sakuraba Neku," he said, delirious and dizzy. Whoever he was, he'd died the same day Kousuke was born.

x x x

_Sakuraba Neku. Died peacefully in his sleep, seventy years old. A musician and artist, with a brief stint as a male model for clothing label 'Mr. Mew' under Shiki Misaki and Eri Izumi. He never married, famously saying that 'his heart belonged to Shibuya'._

Suddenly lamenting the lack of a photocopier, Kousuke copied it out by hand and wished there was a photo. He replaced the newspaper in the dated file and returned to the computer, navigating away from the Obituaries and instead conducting a general search.

Four hours later, he was left with a pile of handwritten notes and an even larger stack of questions- like that one little article describing strange things that had happened on the day Neku died. Things like streetlights going out and a massive fire in Pork City…which were all coincidences, because Kousuke didn't want to think about any alternatives.

He leaned back and tapped his pencil to his lower lip. _What do I know?_ He reached down and gathered up his papers. _Not much. He suddenly appeared on the scene when he was fifteen. Played the guitar, painted a bunch of pictures, said his favourite café was on Cat Street. Petitioned the municipal government to not add an extra station to the Underground Terminal, because they'd be building over the Shibuya River…whatever the heck the Shibuya River is. Favourite flavour of ice cream was mint chocolate chip. Um…he was a male model for Mr. Mew- not like I wear their clothes, but it's as good a place to start as any._

He paused to thank the girl as he left the building, but she had long since left for home.

x x x

"Please, have a seat. Daisuke will see you shortly."

The executive offices for Mr. Mew took up the top six floors of a high-rise building- a little intimidating, but Kousuke was too caught up in this stupid game of Who-The-Heck-Was-Neku-Sakuraba to care about heights. The waiting room also served as some sort of makeshift museum celebrating the line's history. Apparently, sixty years ago or so, the brand used to be known as Gatito. Why there was a name change Kousuke had no idea.

The secretary bristled out of one of the offices. "Right in here, sir." He followed her hands and stepped in.

It wasn't the most remarkable office- a little larger than what he had expected, and with a view that people paid in blood for, but other than that no golden chandeliers or instruments of torture. He took a seat in front of a large mahogany desk.

"Right. Kousuke? You're the one with the school project, right?"

"Uh. Right." Daisuke Toki, chief model director for Mr. Mew, was a little- well, on the modelesque side himself. One of those scary beautiful people. "I, uh, need to conduct an interview about famous male models for my, uh, fashion history class. Do you…know anything about Neku Sakuraba?"

"Sakuraba, eh?" He got up and strolled over to a filing cabinet, opening a drawer and removing a binder. Returning to his seat, he placed it facing towards Kousuke and opened it to a page labelled 'Sakuraba, N'.

"Long gone since I started working, but he's pretty legendary in this industry. Good friends with the ladies who founded this label. Then there was the rumour of an affair with Shiki, and he left the job, went back to his art. Real shame…he was a nice-looking kid, and I've heard that he was really easy to get along with. Probably could have gotten five or six more years out of him. But that's all ancient history now, eh? I was probably about your age when he passed away."

"Yeah," said Kousuke, transfixed by the image on the paper. There was a straight-on shot, a profile shot and a shot of him walking down a runway. He looked oddly familiar, like a person he had run into on the street and not quite committed to memory. And those piercing blue eyes…

"Anything else?"

Kousuke shook his head. "About this affair. How did the rumours start?"

"He started sneaking away with Shiki to the Underground Terminal." Daisuke shook his head. "Probably just wanted to meet and talk, yeah? The paparazzi will eat you alive, though. Later on, when he was about…maybe sixty or so, they were going to tear up a section of the concrete there to build another station. He was the head of a group that wanted to stop it- with all this talk about the Shibuya River. Yeah, it's just a myth, but he probably wanted to preserve his little happy space."

_The Underground Terminal again_. "That's…a lot to think about," he said, suddenly uncomfortable, like there was another presence in the room. "Maybe I'll write that paper about models and activism. Thanks, sir."

"No problem," Daisuke said. "Say, you've got a pretty nice swagger. I'm holding a model casting this Friday- what d'you say? It's a good job for someone your age, number one way to get it good with ladies."

"I'll think about it," Kousuke lied, and walked out the door.


	3. Body Never Forgets

**Animosity**

**Lesson Three: Body Never Forgets**

His heart was pounding as he stared at the concrete wall in the Underground Terminal, certain that this was the wall Neku Sakuraba had fought so hard to save. It didn't look all that interesting- just grey concrete and some weird black graffiti. Kind of similar to the mural in Udagawa, but much more pronounced, though the black had long since faded to grey.

_You can still go back._ The wind had started up again, ever so softly, singing _Sakuraba_ in his head. He could still turn around, go back to his old life playing cards with friends, listening to music, watching Ishida skateboard with little Mina yelling for him to watch his head, doing algebra problems on warm evenings with Risuna as she talked about sewing this and embroidering that- there was still time to forget it all.

He pushed his headphones closer to his ears and let the white noise surround him for a moment. _You can still go back,_ he thought.

_Sakuraba,_ the wind said.

"Hello?" There was no-one around- the last train had come through an hour ago. He took a deep breath. "If this is all some giant joke, let me know now before-"

The wall, which before he was so certain existed, suddenly vanished. It was as though it had served as a solid illusion; as though the wall was less a physical and more a mental construct. He felt lightness in his head as he stepped into the hallway.

It was so quiet his breaths seemed to take up more space than his body. He walked carefully, quietly, wary of the piles of trash scattered at almost random intervals. After a while of keeping his head empty he suddenly became aware of the sound of water running- it became louder and louder until he stumbled upon the legendary Shibuya River.

"Shit," he said, suddenly awed. He lowered his headphones off his ears and onto his shoulders to let the sound in. It wasn't tumultuous, but steady, and pulsed with a rhythm that was like- like something. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes and he sunk to his knees. Why, after months of hearing _Sakuraba_, was it all just to lead him here?

"Beautiful river, isn't it?" He turned around; there was a man, neatly decked in Pegaso, standing behind him. "Shibuya River, I mean."

"Uh," said Kousuke. The man seemed familiar. "Do…I know you?"

"Sort of," he said with a grin, rubbing his chin with one hand. "In more ways than one. Name's Hanekoma. Pleasure to meetcha."

He shook the offered hand. "Listen, Mr…H." He never was good with names. "I have…well- um. You see, uh-" _Nice, Kousuke. How elegant._

"So you're him, huh?" Mr. H tilted his head. "Never figured you'd have dark hair, but I suppose reincarnation doesn't deal with little things."

"S-sorry?"

"Take a walk we me?" There was a bridge over the river he was absolutely certain wasn't there before. "I've got someone who'd like to see you."

_It must be Neku Sakuraba._ His head hurt from the thinking and from the noise, which had slowly grown in intensity- an all-consuming pounding, like the steady beating of his own heart. "W-what do you know about Sakuraba Neku?" He had to shout just to hear himself.

"Hmm? No need to shout."

"But-"

Mr. H stuck his hands in his pockets. He was, by far, the most naturally intimidating person Kousuke had ever met. "-Unless you're hearing it. You must be farther along than we thought."

Kousuke stopped. "That's the thing," he said. Mr. H turned around, a half-curious expression on his face. "One day I start hearing a voice. The next day I'm having seizures from looking at graffiti, and then I'm looking up dead people in archives, and now I'm walking through some kind of weird sewer with a person, no offence, that creeps the crap out of me, and you're telling me about reincarnation and pretending there's no noise when there is." His nails dug into his palms from clenching his fists. "What the _fuck_ is going on?"

Mr. H said nothing, but turned towards a concrete wall in their way and moved his hand as though he was going to open a door in it. And then there _was _a door, and he turned back towards Kousuke.

"Last stop, Dead God's Pad," he said. "Welcome home, Phones."

x x x

Kousuke Mimura was not Neku Sakuraba, but he was pretty damn close. Joshua could see it right away, as Sanae dragged the little kid in- same shuffle, same headphones, same aura. Sure, the reincarnation hadn't gone smoothly, but Joshua was ready to deal with dark features. Not every kid in Japan was going to have blue eyes, and not every kid in Japan was his Neku.

x x x

"This is the one, Josh," Mr. H said, and shoved Kousuke into the middle of the most bizarrely located (and bizarrely decorated) bars he had ever seen. The room was empty but for a kid about his age lounging on one of the couches, with silver hair and violet eyes-

"_Joshua_," he breathed, falling to his knees. Oh, God, it was that kid from before, from in his head, with the smirking and the gun and the shooting and _he'd seen him before, a long time ago_- looking at the mural, reach out and touch, the sound of someone running and then _good night Neku, it's time to destroy Shibuya._

"Hey!" Someone was shouting from far beyond his blurring vision. "Shit, we're losing him again! Shit! Someone-"

x x x

"It's you, then," Neku said to him in a dream.

"Huh," replied Kousuke.

"Yeah." The Neku who stood before him wasn't the twenty-year-old he had seen on file or the seventy-year-old who had died, but someone who could have been him if he tried hard enough. "Listen. A lot is about to be thrown at you, but you're going to have to deal. It's how we all grow as people, right?"

"Uh," said Kousuke.

"They've been waiting for you- and me, I guess- to come back ever since I died, and now that you're here I'm going to move on. I'll leave you with a bit of me, 'cause otherwise you're a fish on land. Oh, and by the way." He turned, and began to walk towards a place Kousuke knew one could never return from. "Joshua's an ass. Don't let him trick you into thinking otherwise."

There was a flash of light, and Neku Sakuraba disappeared.

x x x

"Easy does it, Kou. You've just had an epiphany. How d'you feel?"

"Been better," he said. He lifted his head off the couch and slowly moved himself to sit upright. The bar, which had previously been empty, was now full of Reapers crowded around him- he just hadn't been able to see them before. "Sorry for yelling at you before, Mr. H."

"Not a problem. I don't hold grudges against people who don't know better."

"Which reminds me." He moved the headphones over his ears. "I have some friends- Risuna and Ishida and his sister Mina- that you guys might be interested in."

"In time," came a voice from beside them. Joshua was working his way through the throng, Reapers moving aside to make room for him. He flashed a smirk. "I'm just glad to have you back, Neku."

x x x

It took some quick thinking to explain his new brilliant blue eyes to his classmates, and even he took his time before he knew for certain who was a Player and who was a Reaper and who wasn't part of the Game at all. Ri backed off a little at first, but after a while though she didn't understand she could accept. She never spoke with Shiki the way Kousuke had with Neku, but she did visit the Underground Terminal every once in a while- after all, she had a job with Mr. Mew now, and it was taking up most of her time. Ishida and Mina, on the other hand, declined the invitation and kept their distance. Kousuke had enough of Neku's memory to understand why.

He did eventually accept the role of Conductor after a couple of months observing the Game, and Joshua seemed to find it _hilarious_ that it only took seventy-odd years to convince him to do so. Yeah, Josh was an ass. But Kousuke wasn't Neku, not entirely, so he could handle one effeminate Composer a little better.

Risuna passed away in time, just like all mortal people do. Kousuke had lived long enough to understand that sometimes reincarnation softens you a little bit. And hey- destiny's bigger than any sort of animosity.

Fifteen years don't take all that long to go by, anyway.

_Miiii saaaaa kiiii_

x x x_  
_


End file.
